The image of the dignified Balraj Sahni as the broken Salim Mirza is forever etched in my mind.Īnd if you are a romantic, look no further than Yash Chopra’s Kabhi Kabhie (1976), which I consider among the best romantic dramas made. The story of a Muslim businessman who chooses not to migrate to Pakistan after the country is cleaved into half, captured the magnitude of the tragedy in the fate of one family. The film remains the finest portrayal of the Partition made in India. Stories that refused to offer the comfort of song and dance or pretty people. Now imagine, that at the same time as Desai was creating these outlandish fantasies, Shyam Benegal was making Ankur (1974) and Nishant (1975) – stark, gut-wrenching critiques of exploitation and greed in rural India. He was wholly invested in giving us a good time and honestly, there are few things in Hindi cinema that can match the madness of Bachchan’s drunk scene in this film or the exuberance of the nonsense lyrics in ‘My name is Anthony Gonsalves.’ Diversity flourished – we got some of the best comedies ever made – has anyone topped Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Chupke Chupke (1975) and Golmaal (1979) or Manmohan Desai’s 1977 classic Amar Akbar Anthony? The last took the ‘lost and found’ formula to giddy, absurdist levels. The Angry Young Man and Amitabh Bachchan dominated the decade.īut what makes the 70s so magical is that there was so much more to savor. Bachchan and the Angry Young Man is, to my mind, one of the most organic matches of actor and character – like Rahul and Shah Rukh Khan or Chulbul Pandey and Salman Khan, it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Even when he cried (watch the temple scene in Deewar in which he begs God to spare his mother’s life), you could see the fire in his eyes. Bachchan’s lanky, layered intensity hinted at a constantly simmering rage. Of course, the persona flourished because a stellar actor arrived to inhabit it – Amitabh Bachchan. He was a noble outlaw now, a mafiosi bereft of a moral center (here symbolized by his mother) who is eventually killed by his own brother, a police inspector (Shashi Kapoor) who memorably tells him – mere paas maa hai. So did an even darker avatar of Vijay in Yash Chopra’s Deewar – he no longer functioned within the system.
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The Emergency, one of the darkest chapters in Indian history, arrived two years later. Salim-Javed distilled the angst and frustration that had crept into the social fabric of the country and put a face to it – Vijay, a good man with a scarred soul. The Angry Young Man, created by two of Hindi cinema’s greatest writers – Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar – is one Hindi cinema’s greatest archetypes. This scene, from a film released 45 years ago, was our introduction to the Angry Young Man and it still gives me goosebumps. Yeh police station hai tumhare baap ka ghar nahin. Vijay kicks the chair away and declares, with gritted teeth: Jab tak baithne ko na kaha jaye sharafat se kadhe raho. Early on in Prakash Mehra’s Zanjeer, the swaggering Sher Khan (a suitably flamboyant Pran) saunters into the police station and attempts to sit on the chair in front of newly arrived Inspector Vijay Khanna (a brilliant, brooding Amitabh Bachchan).